Nocode Testing Automation – James Bent, Virtuoso

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another text on TV interview here. I'm happy to be joined by James bent.

James is with a company. It's a new company for our audience here virtuoso. James I I just want to make sure I got that right it's virtuoso and and the website is virtuoso dot QA.

That is correct. Yes. Absolutely.

Good. All right, we're off to a heck of it start James. Why don't we start right there with virtuoso virtuoso QA.

Yeah. What's that something do yeah. Thanks, Alan and thanks for having us on Tech strong.

So virtuoso. We we have created a codeless test automation platform to be able to transform the way people test their browser-by-steplications for functional UI integration and to end testing using our codeless Technologies, which we've been taking out to the market now for a couple of years, but we've actually been around for about four and a half years now in development and then going to Market. Yeah.

Excellent James. What about a little bit about yourself? Yes.

Sure. So I am I'm VP of solutions engineering at virtuoso. I've been on board in the journey for about a year and a half now, so I joined when we are around 30 people we're now about a hundred and ten people plus around the globe.

And yeah, look, I mean my role I'm very lucky that I get to speak to pretty much most of our customers a lot of our sort of key Enterprise and Partnerships and I'm sort of the face that gets to be able to take the platform out to the market sort of be able to speak and present but also learn back from our market in terms of both, you know, what's of Interest how it's adding value and sort of working closely with many areas of the business sort of the cells the the marketing the product the engineering to be able to further Advance this and be very Central so very lucky in that role. Yeah. So, you know, I I had a similar right?

So it was a what we I made the title up Chief strategy officer. I had a company I had helped start in Colorado back in there earlier 2000s and I'm very similar over because I had my hand in marketing and product and sales and you know dealing with customers and stuff and I I love relish the role. com about eight.

Well, 2013-2014 eight nine years ago now and it was funny. com there was this sort of cloud that was hanging over QA and testing. Yeah.

Well devops what did devops mean for testing is devops gonna be the death bell for the QA person is devops just gonna totally order me testing and test things gonna go away as we know it. Well, of course, none of that transpired what in fact happened is that testing became much more sophisticated testing did in fact become continuous in many cases. We do do much more automated testing than we ever did before but we also test better.

I think then we ever did before right testing was always prior to this a kind of Was steal from Paul to pay Peter a steal from Peter to pay Paul whatever they're saying. However, the saying goes, you know, because there was never enough time and budget to do all the testing you wanted. So you had to make a choice and and oftentimes quality lost out today.

I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying this unlimited budgets or unlimited time. But with the Advent of solutions like yours.

Great, we could test more faster quicker even dare. I say cheaper then then we did years ago. Why don't you explain a little bit about how you guys work how you know virtuous or helps with that?

Yeah, definitely and you're sort of you know, what you've described. I mean, what we've got to consider is that not only are you know platforms like ours in terms of automation making it as you say faster easier. Yes and a lot of cases easier from a if we talk cost per test to be able to run but what you've also got a precious in terms of watch actually happening in the development sphere, you know, we've gone from these quiet sort of static applications, you know, more sort of desktop native apps where you're now working a lot more browser based and Cloud technology, which becomes very Dynamic, you know things like literally trying to find a button to click on the screen and automate against becomes more difficult because they're more dynamic in the cloud environment.

So with our sort of Technology where you know virtue I said to describe we're using more of a natural language approach like RPA to enable anybody to literally write in plain English, you know, click on button for example as opposed to dropping into code. But then combining that as well with AI and machine learning to be able to deal with in a lot of cases that the changes that are occurring behind the scenes between releases or maybe each time you load an application. So instead of a very typical issue in automation of automation breaking through Dynamic changes.

We're then combining the natural language approach with machine learning to automatically fix those which firstly makes it more robust but makes it very accessible and fast. Which then we sort of find that actually was happening is that you're moving away from sort of having to you know, QA, you know, it frankly has always been almost a you know, not in the background but it's never been you know, the hero of the development cycle or devops, but it needs to be there and it's not going away. Now what you're doing is saying actually there's always been a lot of pressure on QA, but now we can sort of start say actually if you can go faster and if you can make it easier, you can start thinking about strategies to test sooner and better and wider.

So certainly we are finding platforms such as ours are empowering that in the current stage and then sort of we're really excited about where we take that to continue to evolve as you know development involves and as applications involve if that makes sense. I agree. I think it does make sense entrepresent.

It's funny the interview I did before this one James was somewhere from the security apps outside of the things and it's a very similar story is that in many ways we're development leads. Testing security operations follow us, right and so as our development Cycles methodologies practices have changed. We've gotten more.

You know, all of these other disciplines have had to change along with it and evolve and adapt and they have I mean, that's the good news that they have. Yeah, and so, you know I mean if you look at what you guys do, right and and I told someone eight nine years ago that there's gonna be this functionality that does that You know, they'd probably wouldn't see yeah. Sure.

Yeah not gonna be very good. I could tell you that it won't work, right, but in fact, here we are. Yeah, and an interesting point there is that you know, because we officially going to the banner of codeless and I think we like to be the first to say that you know, people will kind of like yeah, there's there's no such thing as codeless.

You have to write code to have codeless, you know, but there's also this idea that if it's codeless, it must also be a bit too simple and it can't really do the powerful things yet. Actually when we're looking at you know, what you're able to do with codeless technology now, even though you're sort of getting abstracted away from the code, you can still do this very powerful level of testing whether it's sort of testing business applications, you know taking to account environments or data bottom line is codeless Technologies such as ours and others as well. You can start having that power and flexibility, but with speed and accessibility that means actually codeless doesn't have to be the poor cousin of automation or it actually starts being a very powerful tool but that said it is a tool what it's actually doing.

You're saying if I can speed you up and make you more efficient in this case and test automation starts thinking about how you test including all those sort of areas. You point out. It's not just a the application but testing security is a big thing.

Now sort of API security that sort of thing. It's sure about what you do with with the testing rather than trying to get the tool to work if you like Absolutely. It's an amazing thing.

To James without asking to go too deep in the weeds. I wanted to have you explain to our audience kind of the offering and in terms of how is it packaged? How is it offered?

Yeah. Users? Yeah, so we have you know, like a lot of people we have a SAS application.

So it's simple, you know, once you come on board, you know, we have a subscriptions then you obviously get into the platform straightaway. So there's none other things around having to install or set up but the nice thing as well, I mean if we talk about natural language, which is a bit like RPA, you know RPA tools typically require you to spend a lot of time setting up keywords and objects before you can start using this we don't need that because we've used again AI machine learning to say as soon as you fire it up and I write a step like click on home. We find that home button in the application and immediately start creating working automation.

We have something we call live authoring. So as I'm writing my steps or interacting with the screen, we're showing that it runs and passes. So, you know, you're building valid automation.

You can do that with data with Integrations with calling into databases to different environments. So it's sort of very robust being able to test any browser-based application. So a sales Laws and saps for Hannah or a front-end portal.

But then also because we're in the cloud when you run the tests, we're running them on our cloud in parallel and at speed so you can scale up your execution of your testing Suites and then we have full test reporting. So getting insights on every run reading it and playing English with screenshots, you're capturing automatically. So anybody can jump in and see if there's a failure they've got the evidence the screenshots when it was run and then we have debugging tools that you can run and start seeing from things like the dev tools if there are network errors or console issues all in one place.

So it's kind of a full sort of end-to-end solution for test automation, you know within the sphere of functional UI integration into and testing a browser-based applications. And look we've you know while we are, you know, we're 110 people or so. We focus very much.

We I mean what I was really impressed with when I came on firstly we spent two years building the platform to make it really a really good offering but then we've done things like create amazingly good documentation videos and certification courses. So pretty much I could take anyone within reason and within a day, I would have them automating even if they had no experience. But then if you're an engineer, then you could come in and actually really power this to do some really sort of quite amazing things for testing your browser-based applications and then one of sort of the key points as well as again using what we call machine learning driven self healing so when you run the test we automatically say if we can see that home button is still there, but behind the scene we've got Dynamic IDs or ex-pass change or it could be the label changes because of localization.

We automatically heal that with a very high degree of accuracy so you don't have to spend time. Fixing your flaky tests if you like. So that's sort of a bit of a whirlwind sort of just a very high level view of the platform.

But look, I mean it's so indeed exactly but it's it's something you know, people go to our website and have a look and we have got a lot of videos on it, but it's yeah look, I mean genuinely we built this to meet the market and I enjoy being able to go out to all manner of different organizations and the feedback we're generally get is do you know what and you sort of said if I said five years ago this exist people would say, oh my goodness that that's you know won't work even a year ago. People are still saying yeah, you know, I'm not sure that will work. We show it to them they get to try harder it and they go this actually works.

You know, it's quite impressive. Yeah, no doubt. It's real if they work and you know.

I think just overcoming people's hesitancy with that is probably yeah. Job one, right it is it's the biggest thing out there. James I mean just more of the same building on this momentum building on this base.

What do you see like, is there a big breakthrough coming or something? Yeah. I think there are two sort of size one is really sort of, you know building firstly our presence, but then also building if you like what we're interested is building the new the new Norm for testing in terms of strategies the new way to think about automated testing without the constraints of the technology.

So we're sort of doing work in terms of almost universities to say not sort of so much specific to us, but actually now you're freed up what you can do with testing so sort of going out and saying really actually what you can do in strategically. But then the second side is actually where more we can take AR and machine learning, you know, actually what you can do with by looking let's say into a lot of the logs that are collected when people use applications to be able to start autonomously generating sort of testing being able to start using AI machine learning to say actually, where should you prioritize your testing? Where are you most likely to get bugs or issues when you're developing?

It's the start to really, you know, augment what we're doing all the time. They're being very clear that we don't believe that automation is going to replace people, you know, and as much as AI machine learning is going to replace people it's not going see what it's going to do is empowered and further, you know, nobody to stay can do enough in this space. So this actually says actually we can Empower that an increase the levels you do this, that's really where we're going this further empowerment both in the technology, but also actually in how you can now test better that you're freed up through these types of tools if that makes sense.

Makes sense perfectly. Hey James. We're almost at a time.

I know we mentioned the website in the beginning of the the interview, but why don't you give people again the website where they can go to get more information. Absolutely. Yes, it's virtue.

qa and when you go there as you'd expect we have a 14-day free trial we have links to our documentation. qa then either you can get going yourself or reach out to us. We'll be more than happy to have and informal discussion to see if it meets needs more than happy to of course.

qi QA love it. Hey, James. Thanks for coming on Tech stroke TV.

Come back and keep us posted about engines. It's going down here. All right.

Okay, we're gonna take a break here on Tech strong. We'll be back in a moment.